The story of how Jordan Peele created the sunken place in ‘Get Out’
Comedy actor Jordan Peele was launched into filmmaker stardom following his 2017 Oscar-winning film Get Out, impressive considering it was his debut. The film received acclaim for its social critique, spotlighting horror within an intellectual realm.
Peele’s compelling script follows a young black man called Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), who travels with his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) to meet her overtly Liberal family. During his stay, Chris experiences excessive virtue signalling. He then discovers there’s a sickening reason for his invitation. Rose’s family auctioned black people’s bodies off to cultural vultures so they could inhabit them.
Suspenseful imagery and concepts are used to execute Get Out‘s blend of psychological horror and social commentary. One of the most chilling examples is the sunken place. This is a psychological state Rose’s mother hypnotises Chris into using trigger actions.
The place is represented as Chris’ consciousness falling deeper into a black endless void in slow motion, with his physical self remaining above him. This is what traps black people’s minds, allowing the white families to then inhabit the bodies. Peele shared his thought process behind the haunting scene with Julie Miller for Vanity Fair. The director revealed he “always had this concept of the place that you’re falling toward when you’re going to sleep. You get that falling sensation and catch yourself. And if you didn’t catch yourself, where would you end up?”. This shows the sunken place was derived from a nightmare scenario all viewers are familiar with.
Peele continues his explanation with how he “had this hellish image” in mind. This terrifying image came from his questions ‘”what if you were in a place, and you could look through your own eyes as if they were literal windows or a screen, and see what your body was seeing, but feel like a prisoner in your mind—the chamber of your mind?’”. This idea is translated to the screen using the brightly lit box above Chris in the sunken place.
Watching Chris slip further away from his body creates a dreadful atmosphere, which Peele associates with a feeling of being trapped.
“The moment I thought of that, it immediately occurred to me the theme of abduction and connection to the prison industrial complex that this movie was sort of presenting a metaphor for”, Peele states. He describes the aftermath of building this idea as “a very emotional discovery”.
Peele then describes seeing his creation come to life. “I remember having so much fun writing it, but at that moment when I figured out this weird, esoteric, but also an emotionally brutal form of suffering to put the character through—I cried writing the scene.”
